Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1 319
mikemuch writes "IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today. The development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won't say how long until it goes gold. PCMag.com got an early look and has posted a full review of Internet Explorer 8 RC1. The release candidate differs only slightly from Beta 2, most notably in tweaks to its InPrivate Browsing feature, aka porn mode. That feature has been decoupled with InPrivate Filtering, which blocks third-party content providers from creating profile of your browsing habits. RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added — the first browser to include such protections. Versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista, as well as for 32-bit XP are available, but Windows 7, which will ship with IE8, is stuck with an older beta for now."
Clickjacking (Score:5, Informative)
Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added â" the first browser to include such protections.
No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.
It's just that, with FireFox, anything that isn't related to bare simple display of HTML pages, is usually tucked into separate plugins.
But the Noscript [noscript.net] plugin has featured click-jacking prevention almost from the next day after click-jacking came in the news.
Re:One giant security hole (Score:3, Informative)
Heh. Not in comparison to Firefox, but my copy of Konqueror on KDE leaves both of them in its dust.
But aside from resource demands (and I'll wait until I can try it properly before I make any judgements), IE8 looks quite nice. I'd certainly be willing to try it out if they made a version for non-Windows systems. How about it Microsoft - fancy branching out?
Re:Clickjacking (Score:3, Informative)
No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.
It's more than "turned on by default"; that suggests there's a checkbox somewhere that is just off. The support isn't even installed by default.
Noscript may have deserved mention in the summary, but there is a difference between "including such protections" and "has such protections available in an add-on", and the difference is much more than between "including such protections turned on by default" and "including such protections turned off by default".
Re:Standards (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty funny.. I ran it on firefox (which I can't update due to IS) and got 71, Opera (which I can't update due to IS) 85. IE Version 7.0.5730.11 (which IS may or may not update) and it was unintelligble (couldn't even see score), and IE 6 in Citrix which got an 11.
Re:Something to credit Microsoft for (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:3, Informative)
Just in response to point A: Firefox may be damn good, but if you are a web developer and need to make sure your site works across all browsers, IE Tab isn't a bad thing to have.
True, but since you have to have a copy of IE around anyway, you might as well just use it.
IE-Tab doesn't really simplify things that much, and its not inconceivable that something will work differently in actual IE than IE-tab. (basic rendering of course will be the same, but some of the more goofy stuff like how various IE preferences and internet zones impact things might be different. I'm really not 100% sure where "Trident" ends and "Internet Explorer" begins, so to speak), nor exactly where IE-Tab fits -- is it 100% on top of IE or just on just on top of Trident?
So for casual layout testing I'll use IE tab, but for serious testing its done on 'honest-to-goodness-IE' and multiple versions of it to boot.
Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't tried (but will now...), but couldn't you use IETab with Firebug to actually figure out how to fix all of the stupid rendering problems caused by IE (read: screw with the CSS via Firebug until it works)? To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to do real-time stylesheet editing with IE/the Trident engine, unlike Firefox which has Firebug and Safari/Webkit which has several tools on the Mac such as CSSEdit.
I still pray that someone will use one of IE's security flaws to force an upgrade to ANY standards-compliant browser, even IE8 by the looks of things.
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:3, Informative)
a) Why would you need to do that if Firefox was so perfect?
Because we don't live in a perfect world where getting Windows' updates can be obtained via Firefox.
Re:Standards (Score:3, Informative)
I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.
They're working on it; they haven't gotten there yet. IE8 does not pass Acid3, but neither do the current shipping versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome. Most of these should pass Acid3 in their next major release, but Firefox won't pass Acid3 for awhile (probably not until 4.0).
IE8 does pass Acid2, which represents a major improvement in standards-compliance and compatibility over previous versions of IE.
Nobody's saying IE8 is a better browser than Firefox. If you're already running Firefox, that's great. Stick with that. Don't switch to IE. But for anyone currently running IE, this is a huge improvement (and, unlike the switch from IE6 to IE7, upgrading from IE7 to IE8 shouldn't break anything, because there's an IE7 compatibility mode for stupid broken web sites).
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:2, Informative)
IE is NOT the first browser to implement anti-clickjacking tech. Firefox + NoScript has had a non-obtrusive (read:it works with the "globally allow scripts [etc]" option enabled) clickjacking blocker known as ClearClick [noscript.net] for quite a while [noscript.net] now [hackademix.net]. It is inaccurate to compare vanilla Firefox with other browsers since Mozilla intended Fx to be used with addons. NoScript is a perfect example.
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:3, Informative)
There are IE plugins [ieaddons.com], too, including ad blockers (just search).
Re:Awesome compatibility for developers (Score:3, Informative)
Don't worry, there is a way to target .NET 1.1 with VS 2005 [codeplex.com] and even with VS 2008 [devlicio.us].
Re:Something to credit Microsoft for (Score:3, Informative)
The CSS specification includes support for display: table; display: table-row; and display: table-cell;
which are quite useful when you need table-like layout.
Shame IE never supported them. Until *drumroll* IE8 - shame they aren't doing so well on other fronts.
But, fortunately, you can work around this. Yes, it is a bit more work, but that is not the fault of CSS.
Additionally, working around it just takes a little getting used to.
Those singing the praises of table layout in some cases just never got the hang of a more fluid layout. Hopefully you're not in that camp.
Re:Standards (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dear net-surfers: (Score:3, Informative)
Get a thumb drive and Firefox Portable [portableapps.com], and all your problems will be solved.
Re:I need stability (Score:2, Informative)
Both IE6 and IE7 leak [ajaxian.com] memory [microsoft.com] even after you close the page. Most well known Ajax apps don't leak memory because they have spent plenty of man-hours working through the problems and designing the libraries around the issues by using leak [ajaxian.com] detection tools [sourceforge.net]. I personally have spent weeks and weeks resolving leaks.
Stability? You what?! It bloody crashes all the time. Their own web outlook client completely crashes IE regularly (and no, I am not talking about ActiveX plugins crashing IE - I have been forces to implement many hacks to work around plenty of horrid crashes in IE.)
On second thought perhaps you have just trolled me - although I try not to underestimate an IE user.
Re:Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ? (Score:2, Informative)
My last job was a position as a web developer and the company policy was basically to ONLY develop for IE as that is the only market my boss seemed to care about. Of course that didn't stop me from testing in Firefox too...
What I found was that IE6 is horrible. Really, quite possible the worst browser ever considering it's rendering behavior in a time of web standardization.
IE7 was like a breath of fresh air. Normally, any rendering differences between it and Firefox were due to a box model rendering difference. Often, I could develop in one browser and then make small modifications at the end to get a nearly exact viewing experience in the other browser.
I only got to test IE8 for a short time before I moved on to my current job, but I was very impressed with the standards-compliance improvements (the Expression Web product line is focused on the creation of standards-based websites so it does seem like Microsoft is finally listening to the masses on this one). The backwards-compliance mode was a good compromise and seemed to work well. My latest sites all either worked very well in IE8 or needed only small visual tweaks.
I'm hoping IE8 helps bump IE6 off the map completely and promotes the development of well-coded sites in the future to comply with the default strict doctype mode.
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:2, Informative)
How many versions of Internet Explorer have been released with no desire, attempt or effort to pass the simple Acid 2 compatibility standards test? (...not that it matters as there are plenty of other browser options [slashdot.org]) Per the Wikipedia page on Acid 2, The only major browser that does not yet pass the test is Internet Explorer, although a version of Internet Explorer that passes Acid2 is in development.
IE. V 8.0.x was released publicly on March 5, 2008.
In March 2008, Ian Hickson released Acid3 as a follow-up to Acid2. While Acid2 primarily tests CSS, Acid3 focuses more on JavaScript and other "Web 2.0" technologies.[11]; Based on past experience we can extrapolate out that Microsoft Internet Explorer might pass the Acid 3 tests around 2012, but I doubt it.
Sure they believe in standards compatibility, sure they do...NOT. Simple historical reality exposes their hypocrisy!
Re:Interesting statistic (Score:3, Informative)
Well, Firefox can't always take the lead. But Safari had private browsing years ago. :-)
Wikipedia: "Version 2.0 of Safari was released on April 29, 2005... includes a built-in RSS and Atom reader. Other features include Private Browsing..."
Funny. They even have a link to 'porn mode' which has a handy table showing which browsers had it when. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porn_mode [wikipedia.org]
Re:Awesome compatibility for developers (Score:3, Informative)
Um, VS.NET 2002 (7.0) targeted .NET 1.0. If you need to target 1.1, you want VS.NET 2003 (7.1).